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From maverick director Bruce La Bruce comes the horrific and subversive smash of the Berlin and Sundance film festivals – Otto. A young zombie named Otto appears on a remote highway. He has no idea where he came from or where he is going. He hitches a ride to Berlin where he is discovered by underground filmmaker Medea Yarn. Fascinated, Medea decides to film a documentary with Otto as her subject. When Otto discovers that there is a wallet in his back pocket that contains information about his past, before he was dead, he begins to remember a few details, including memories of his ex-boyfriend, Rudolf. Otto arranges to meet him with devastating results. Savagely sexual and overtly gruesome Otto is a true original.Read More »

Distinguished as being ‘banned forever’ in its native Czechoslovakia, Nemec’s film is a masterpiece of barbed, darkly sinister wit. As a biting satire of governmental and institutional power and with its astute observations of human nature and conformity, it is a film whose relevance continues to this day.
Considered the most politically dangerous film made during the short flowering of the Czech New Wave in the 1960s, this is its first-ever release on DVD.Read More »

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There are no spirits or snakes tonight and the forest around the village is quiet. Fifteen-year old Ihjãc has had nightmares since he lost his father. He is an indigenous Krahô from the north of Brazil. Ihjãc walks into darkness, his sweaty body moves with fright. A distant chant comes through the palm trees. His father’s voice calls him to the waterfall: it´s time for Ihjãc to organize his father’s funerary feast so that his spirit can depart to the village of the dead. The mourning must cease. Denying his duty and in order to escape the process of becoming a shaman, Ihjãc runs away to the city, where he must face the reality of being an indigenous person in contemporary Brazil.Read More »

Synopsis: The unemployed electrician Juergen Potzkothen (Helge Schneider) lives with his mother (Andreas Kunze) and dreams of happiness as a pop singer. When he presents a demo tape to the artist agent Terrence Toi (also Andreas Kunze), he is -rather coincidentally- dedicated and gets the artist’s name Johnny Flash. But the music editor Cornelia Dom wants him for her music broadcast commitment too. Naive Juergen now stands inbetween the emerging rivalry of both music agents and their commercial interests. Ultimately, however, he gives the vocal performance in Tois broadcast and hits the big breakthrough to a large overnight star.Read More »

Shot with stunning elegance and clarity, NAKED SPACES explores the rhythm and ritual of life in the rural environments of six West African countries (Mauritania, Mali, Burkino Faso, Togo, Benin and Senegal). The nonlinear structure of NAKED SPACES challenges the traditions of ethnographic filmmaking, while sensuous sights and sounds lead the viewer on a poetic journey to the most inaccessible parts of the African continent, the private interaction of people in their living spaces.Read More »

“White people don’t understand that there are two laws and two different kinds of custom in Australia… White people have different laws from Aboriginal people.”

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The Borroloola Aboriginal Community is made up of four language groups from the gulf region of the Northern Territory. The people live within a tribal structure and all decisions concerning this film were made within this structure.
The opening words of the film are spoken by Leo Finlay, a prominent member of the Borroloola community:
“I suppose you know these two, Alexander and Caroline. Last year was in Sydney and asked them to come down to make film in Borroloola for our own people. They’re here in Borroloola now and we’re glad that they came to make this film. They been apply to the government to get some money to make this film which was real good. So its our film and we’re going to make really good film out of it.”Read More »

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Stairway to the Distant Past is the second film in the Mike Hama Private Investigator Trilogy. If you’ve seen part one The Most Terrible Time in My Life you must seek this out to find out how all your favourite characters are getting on. The films themes are age and family as Mikes mother “Dynamite Sexy Lilly” returns to Yokohama with her strip act many years after deserting Mike and his sister Akane. She reveals who Mikes father is and he sets out to find him. This films DoP deserves an Oscar as the picture is stunningly shot – it reminded me most of the Cinema du Look of Luc Besson and Leos Carax.Read More »

Once upon a time there was a war In the darkness of the night, a young soldier goes AWOL. Tonia, a veteran transsexual in Lisbons drag shows, watches the world around her crumble. The competition from younger artists threatens her star status. Under pressure from her young boyfriend Rosário to assume her female identity, the sex change operation that will transform her into a woman, Tonia struggles against her deeply-held religious convictions. If, on the one hand, she wants to be the woman that Rosário so desires, on the other, she knows that before God she can never be that woman. And her son, whom she abandoned when he was a child, now a deserter, comes looking for her. Read More »

In the turbulent aftermath of the Tunisian revolution, young Samia (Sarra Hannachi) flees her homeland. She braves hostile seas in the crossing to France, but once there she finds that her struggles have only just begun. With no friends, no family, and – most crucially – no immigration papers, Samia has to figure out how to make a life and a living in a foreign land.

She meets a young man, Imed (Salim Kechiouche, Blue is the Warmest Color), and soon finds work in the employ of the elegant Leila (the inimitable Hiam Abbass, subject of an In Conversation With event at the Festival this year). But her presence in Leila’s middle-class household triggers a shift in its dynamics, and soon Samia is enmeshed in a web of sexual tension.Read More »